In what ways does your media product use, develop or challenge forms and conventions of real media products?
Like many media products, our magazine cover and the magazine itself was aimed for a specific audience and a specific audience type. We decided to base our magazine around the student reader, something they could read which would be not only an entertaining read, but also an educational read, a magazine that would speak to students as adults. For our pre research and analyse of other media products to help us, we decided that the magazine “Teen Vogue” was something very similar to what we wanted to create. This magazine dealt with relevant issues, gave fashion advice and also advice for students in general (e.g. study tips, revision, ECT), which again was similar to what we wanted to create.
So this magazine was our main influence throughout the task, yet we didn’t want to cop this magazine as we wanted to make our own style of magazine, give it an individual stamp. Like “Teen Vogue”, we decided to have the masthead in front of the main image; this helps it to stand out to the readers, signifying straight away what the magazine stands for. Like many other magazines we analysed in the research stage, we had many headings on our front cover to attract readers into the magazine; these would also attract the audience that we wanted to attract.
Who would be the audience for your media product?
The main audience type for our magazine was students at college and university, this magazine would offer readers not only an entertaining read but also an educational read, addressing them as young adults; unlike a typical “girly” magazine. We also looked into the type of psychographics of our audience – what our audience thought of themselves, not just as readers, but as people. We decided that our readers would most likely be either aspirers or achievers. This is mainly because we are aiming this magazine for students, so these would be main categories they’d fit into. Taking the jignar scale into consideration, we decided that our readers would be at stage c2 – c1. We made this decision due to the fact we want our readers to be quite sophisticated readers, as the magazine would address them as adults, yet at the same time we would want them to be typical students and to be hedonists.
How did you attract/address your audience?
We used a bold masthead, which was on top of the main image to connote attract an audience straight to our magazine, this would straight away explain what kind of magazine it is and what the magazine represents.
The bold, pink colours around the cover connotes a student, teenage feel to the magazine, it also attracts a female audience with the use of colouring. Also the main image connotes a student audience as the girl in the image has vibrant hair, a popular logo on her t-shirt, which would also attract a student audience, yet at the same time gives the audience an insight into what the magazine could include. The header “voted top teen magazine of the year” underneath the masthead connotes popularity and the success of the magazine already, which would also attract readers. Rhetorical questions are used to help provoke readers to want to answer them, also it interests them and intrigues them into finding out more. We used shadowing on the main headings and the masthead to grab the readers attention once again to connote importance, these would obviously catch the readers eye when they first look at the magazine. The colour scheme used isn't aimed for a mainstream audience, as it's not as bright and vibrant as some of typical, mainstream "girly" magazines. It's more sophisticated, using pale, pastel colours to attract a more upper class, sophisticated audience.
What have you learnt about technologies fro the process of constructing this product?
The new technology we used enabled us to complete this task as it aloud us to edit the main image to the way we wanted it using Photoshop, which also aloud us to create the front cover itself. It also aloud us to edit and add text onto the main image, this helped us make the image look more like a front cover. The internet allowed us to analyse and research into other media products, this helped us get an idea of what we wanted our product to look like along with helping us decide what audience we wanted to aim our product at, along with this it also allowed us to gather images we could use for our contents page. Digital SLR cameras were useful as they allowed us to take pictures for the main image used for the front cover, it also allowed us to take images for maybe the contents page and for articles within the magazine. Like Photoshop, Indesign was software that really helped us when coming to design the contents page, it also helped us decide where to place certain aspects of the contents page, making it look a lot more professional.
Using blogger.com did confuse me though when we first started the project but as we got further into designing the front page, it was helpful and did help me store my work neatly and it was definitely a lot less hassle then having to print each page off. It did help me present work better and it also gave me more confidence as I knew it would be marked in a more accessible and neat way then if I were to print out each page.
